Over and over again, those who report on and analyze politics at close range have documented the president's lies, exposed his schemes to enrich himself, taken note of his errors and their consequences, and highlighted his incompetence and cruelty — and at every step of the way they have assumed this would make a political difference. But it hasn't.

Maybe it's time to recognize that it won't.

Accepting this is hard. Journalists, academics, and intellectuals tend to be idealists. They went into this line of work not because they wanted to be rich but because they wanted to make the world a better place in some way. This doesn't mean their ideas on improving things would always have positive outcomes if they were enacted, or that their favored policy proposals deserve to take priority in our public life. Not at all. But it does mean they tend to assume that most people will recoil from outright lies, deception, malice, injustice, sleaze, and thuggish imbecility when it is exposed and demonstrated to them.

But maybe that isn't true.

Maybe most of what has been written about the president and his party in the mainstream media is true — and yet it won't mean that this produces "the end of the Trump presidency" at all. Maybe enough Americans in enough states just don't care. Or maybe enough of them do care but in an affirmative way. They like politics conducted like pro-wrestling. They smile at the vulgarity. They approve of a president who acts and thinks like a mob boss and prefer a politics of clientalistic corruption to an administrative state of well-trained experts and bureaucrats who aspire to scrupulous competence and ideological neutrality (while sometimes falling short of achieving it). Maybe instead of responding to evidence that Trump is a clownish demagogue, they respond by saying, "Good, and thanks for noticing."

Maybe they like these things because they're Republicans and Republicans benefit from the Republican president ruthlessly pursuing policies that Republicans want. (Every faction of the GOP has enjoyed victories and gains during the Trump administration.) Maybe they also like these things because they follow politics for the entertainment and the Trump presidency is fun. He spews rhetorical sulfuric acid at their political and cultural enemies, and he does it with relish and humor. And the victims of his vitriol typically respond by flying off into an indignant, self-important, and self-defeating rage. What could be politically sweeter than that

Comments

FUCK Trump. 30-40 minutes into this stupid briefing and not one FUCKING word from him about all the Americans who are sick and dying. Not one FUCKING word. He doesn’t give a FUCK about the Americans who’ve been killed by this virus.

You seem to have your life and soul invested in partisan divisiveness. I have always felt very strongly that Trump is on neither "side", only his own, so that this was sort of a futile effort, and so did others like Flavius who thought it might be helpful to treat acquainances like "Ted" as another human being and not his mortal enemy. More than futile as Trump and Putin's method is to stoke exactly the sort of divisiveness that you like. You like playing their game.

But now my thinking has gone in another direction: your passionate "us vs. them" partisanship it is very detrimental not just to your cause(s), but to your very own life. That doctor or nurse who treats you could very well be a Republican. We're all human beings, you are going to have to get used to that and give up the heavy duty partisanship that will blind you to what needs to be done and how it needs to be done now and in the future. Example: Cuomo does not care what party his fellow governors are in.

More than 2,400 Americans had died by Sunday. Governors around the country are screaming for more assistance from the federal government. Trump? He obsesses over ratings. It is hard to comprehend how indifferent he is to human suffering.

Trump happens to be enjoying his highest approval ratings at the moment. It is possible he will somehow maintain, or even enhance, his current standing. But his handling of the coronavirus — even from the narrow perspective of politics, which is how Trump himself views it — is doing almost everything to ensure that his bump is short-lived, and will eventually be followed by a long, steep decline.

Trump’s recent polling bump is real. The important context, though, is that every leader is getting approval bumps, and almost all of them are getting much bigger ones than Trump. ....

... Congress doesn’t have the luxury of ignoring this. There are members of Congress who are severely ill with COVID-19, and many others who are currently self-quarantining and unable to vote. They’re also responsible for their constituents’ health, and most of them are not outright insane. They know that the best policy is to follow expert scientific advice, and the best politics is to let others take responsibility for any negative economic consequences that result. Taking actions that will lead to a couple of million excess deaths isn’t going to be good for them on any level, especially because it won’t improve the economy.

There may come a point soon when Trump openly defies his health advisors and causes many of them to resign. That will be the point when members of Trump’s cabinet will have to decide whether or not to invoke the 25th Amendment. The prospect of having a couple million deaths on your conscience can change people’s ordinary calculation of what it means for a president to be unfit for office. ... There has to be some line beyond which the Republicans will not go in their blind obedience to Trump. This crisis seems perfectly designed to discover exactly where that line is.

I am beyond making excuses for people who support Trump. At the end of the day, Trump is willing to kill my family. I don't wish harm to Trump or his supporters , I just don't want them in charge. I see no reason to appease them. I realize that my situation is different than the legislators. Legislators have to get bills passed and make compromises. I want to get Democrats and Independents to vote Republicans out of office. There are two different priorities.

I am tired of listening to talk about what Liberals do that makes people vote for Trump. If after Mueller, Impeachment, and the mishandling of coronavirus, someone still supports Trump, we have absolutely nothing in common. We are not one big happy family.

Note that despite the health threat posed by coronavirus, Republicans still want to abolish Obamacare and have no replacement plan. How is Trump even in the running?

Edit to add:

Trump still has support from farmers who had their income shattered by Trump's tariffs. I am not sure that health concerns will have a major impact. We will see when coronavirus reaches their area.

There are no excuses for voters or politicians who support or enable Trump. History rhymes. Demagoguery, lies, racism, cult of charismatic leadership, greed, dehumanization and scapegoating, politics of unaccountable power ...

"A large part of the population clung sentimentally to their Fuhrer right up to the end...They could not bear to lose their faith in him who had appeared to them as a mass redeemer. Nor could they give up their belief in the justification of the Hitler program."

The Curtain Falls, Last Days of the Third Reich, 1945 , Folke Bernadotte.

I was just pointing out that I live in the United States. The video has nothing to do with what we hear from Trump on a daily basis. I did not hear positive comments about Trump in any part of the video. You might send the video to the White House.

Edit to add:

It is a nice video

I have contact with friends and cousins I have not called in years.

Didn't need the video to remind me I needed to do that.

Everybody wants everyone to be safe, but we know life is fragile and some friends and family may die.

i was thinking more major change big picture, wild things are no doubt going to happen. What will they be? I will share my stream of consciousness tonight (and no I am not stoned or drunk.) First along the lines of how Biden's campaign before was already totally e pluribus unum, stop the divisiveness, that's where he was already going. But he could die from coronavirus, then there would be a movement to draft Cuomo (inspired by seeing stuff like this on twitter) who is the same general attitude, but a little less nice guy about effecting it, more authoritarian. Then I jumped to thinking about my "GOP moving to the left?" thread. And how shocked Andrew Yang seems that his guaranteed minimum income thing went mainstream so fast, all it takes is a pandemic. And then after the dust up on this thread for the umpteenth time about partisan delusions (when independents had already become the biggest party before this started happening.) AND THEN I thought: HEY, what ever happened to the passionate partisans of the Whig Party? why did they fade away So I started to dig into that and lo and behold I am reminded that populist Andrew Jackson was the catalyst for its creation:

and there were just the two of them ruling for a few decades, a sort of maintaining moderation and when time came for more activist liberalism from the north including abolitionism, we got the rise of the passionate Republicans.....

wild enough for now.

Trump will either stick it out to the Nov. or he won't, I don't see much difference. Other people are running things, he's just the clown in front of the curtain, don't think he's gonna matter that much in the interim. It's just unseemly for opposition to start politicking until the first wave of deaths have occurred.

Yeah this seems important and suggests that a lot of Trump's approval bounce comes from Dems and indies who are trying to express sympathy at a time of national crisis but have no intention of voting for him. https://t.co/fnUhMd8wCp

Tracking polls show that President Trump has actually lost a point or two of ground in general election matchups over the last couple of weeks, even while his approval rating has increased. https://t.co/VyV72pztLy

Somebody is dying of coronavirus every 6 minutes in NYC, we are headed to 80,000 to 100,000 fatalities before this is over, which isn't going to be this year.

Trump "We’re the ones that gave the great response, and we’re the ones that kept China out of here, and if I didn’t do it, you’d have thousands and thousands of people died—who would have died that are now living and happy."

His plan for reelection is, "if you aren't dead, I saved your life. Show some appreciation. I take no responsibility for those who governors failed to save".

Many Americans are naive low information marks for his con, but not enough to believe that.

Wouldn't be surprised. White males have been enthralled with 30 years of Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch pushing 'manifest white destiny' lies, bigotry which they are addicted to hearing. Trump says what too many of them think. If things get bad enough though, Biden would do well with all except the evangelicals.

I suspect it's like this: low-info and slow-info voters pollster answers (including, as Nate Silver notes above, a sprinkling of Dems and independents) see him as being bi-partisan and leading on coronvirus crisis up until now. Why wouldn't they, they see his hours long press conferences on teevee, and he's been blathering on and on that he does stuff that high info know he hasn't. Look, for example here, this is true, he did all these things yesterday that this VICE news guy says, I googled them

Just so I've got this straight: Trump is thanking Rachel Maddow, praising Bill de Blasio, "impressed" by John Kerry, has "much respect" for Xi Jinping, and thinks Thomas Massie should be expelled from the Republican Party

That's how he's appearing to the low-info and slow-info voter. Including his support of the bill.They're still trying to figure out about washing their vegetables and getting some plastic gloves and how they are going to rob peter to pay paul to pay the credit card minimums.

I also suspect these are the same people pressuring a Dem governor of R.I. to ban New Yorkers from their state. As that's gonna protect them from someone from RI with RI plates bringing the virus back after a trip from NY! They need time to understand what's really going on. Meantime he's like Geo. Bush or Rudy Guiliani after 9/11 for some of them, until they figure out what's really going on.

we are not talking about Trump supporters, we are talking about the recent small rise in approval ratings.

If you want to rant on Trump and supporters, go right ahead, I just refuse to become your Trump supporting strawman for the umpteenth time. I don't need any lectures and links about how stupid they are. It's insulting that you do this. Please cut it out. Start a blog post where you can repost the same links and point over and over if that's what gets you off.

That's how he's appearing to the low-info and slow-info voter. Including his support of the bill.They're still trying to figure out about washing their vegetables and getting some plastic gloves and how they are going to rob peter to pay paul to pay the credit card minimums.

I also suspect these are the same people pressuring a Dem governor of R.I. to ban New Yorkers from their state. As that's gonna protect them from someone from RI with RI plates bringing the virus back after a trip from NY! They need time to understand what's really going on. Meantime he's like Geo. Bush or Rudy Guiliani after 9/11 for some of them, until they figure out what's really going on.

for sure, and you might remember how I was of the opinion that it was already cracking before coronavirus, we even tussled a little about that. whatever doesn't matter any more. best hope for the future is that millennials and GenZ of selfless nature get inspired by the nightmare to go into the field.

It is odd that this is the time to take a poll.
We are hunkering in our abodes hoping the plague of Frogs does not strike us down.
The wishful thinking, or wishful wishfulnesses, if you will, is that the dire things won't be too dire.
It would be great if it is not all as bad as predicted by whoever.

To take a poll right now expresses confidence in a process that we have no reason to think is going on any longer.

Well, for my part, it was odd to have it disappear because I have been staying out of that particular line of discussion and said stuff that I consider different from arguments already repeated many times.

I do not feel the animosity expressed by others regarding the topic and its previous discussion. I wonder if you are all wrong.

We will see how things play out in the next House stimulus bill in April.

We will also see if Mississippi and Alabama are forced into lockdown like several blue states.

Don't see Kumbaya coming.

“We are not coming back for a few weeks but I do think we can do our committee work in the meantime,” Pelosi told reporters on a conference call.

Many of the priorities she and other senior Democrats listed had been previously outlined and were part of their alternative stimulus legislation but were rejected by Senate leaders in negotiations with President Donald Trump’s administration. Pelosi gave no details on how much the plan would cost.

In an interview with the New York Times published on Monday, she said that another possibility was getting rid of the limit on state and local tax deductions, or SALT, that was part of the president’s 2017 tax overhaul. Pelosi’s home state of California was among those affected by the SALT limits.

She also suggested that such a move, sure to encounter strong Republican opposition, should be retroactive.

But a spokesman for Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Finance Committee, called the idea “a nonstarter.”

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